Hunter Simcraft Results 5.2 (initial thoughts)

Note: Yes these are early numbers. Yes, there will be bugs and misrepresentations. No, the sky is not falling (yet). The people at Simulationcraft are still playing with their numbers - things will change.

So the wonderful people at Simulationcraft have pumped out their initial 5.2 T15H numbers. And, as expected, it puts all 3 hunter specs in the bottom 10 with all hunter specs being within about 6k DPS of each other.

It also shows an overall DPS spread (between all classes) of 35k dps. I lol'ed pretty hard when I saw that one.

The good news is that the sims seem to confirm what most theorycrafters expected: all Hunter specs are very close. Despite the fact that broken pet mechanics hurt BM on several fights this tier, most raiders should be able to play anything (although I would recommend Survival as the go-to spec this tier).

The bad news is painfully obvious. Although these sims are very early, and are done using BiS T15 gear, it is fairly clear that something is a miss. Here are my initial thoughts on the position of Hunters thus far:

All of our specs are very close to one another. Survival will be the default spec of the tier. BM is broken on several fights (due to pet bugs that have been in since early PTR).

My initial impressions from my guilds lolnormal clears this week have been that Hunters will be outshined on every fight by dotters / casters; the amount of fights with multidotting / cleaving is crazy. There are exceptions like Tortos and, to a lesser extent, Ji-kun where we can AoE very well, but when it comes to ranged classes this is a Lock / Spriest tier.

Hunters were in a good spot last tier. However, all those ranged classes under us received buffs which pushed them up above us ultimately leading to us being pushed towards the bottom. Blizzard focused more on getting all of our specs in line with eachother and not with the rest of the DPS spectrum.

In the next few weeks (probably 2 weeks) we will see nerfs to caster multi-dotting (save Boomkins probably) and maybe some kind of buff to hunters (Aspect of the Hawk in T13).

Where's the Yes, these numbers really don't mean anything because there really isn't any stand still blow the boss up fight. :P

Also, Dracodraco posted this yesterday: http://i.imgur.com/2V4fSBw.png . Not sure why our DPS would get lower since not much has changed. And I do not see how BM would still be top.

I didn't run those numbers myself, they're from a guildy of mine, but he usually knows his sims. I think the numbers there may be pre-frost DK, rogue and shadow priest buffs, but regardless, I can't see any reason why there would be a 10K dps difference.
And while there's obviously scaling to consider, I highly doubt we're THAT low - my guild has some of the most hardcore DPS-whores you can imagine - this is our Jin'rokh kill: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...d/?s=391&e=576 (fifth fastest kill worldwide so far according to WOL).
As you can see, I'm having no issues keeping up on singletarget. You can go through the logs, but disregard Tortos and Ji-kun as I was on bitch-duty there (punting turtles and flying loops). Did quite well on horridon too, but too much whoring is possible by staying on the boss instead of adds (hint - I don't whore). Magheara is protectors V2 ;_; - and again, I don't whore.

I didn't run those numbers myself, they're from a guildy of mine, but he usually knows his sims. I think the numbers there may be pre-frost DK, rogue and shadow priest buffs, but regardless, I can't see any reason why there would be a 10K dps difference.
And while there's obviously scaling to consider, I highly doubt we're THAT low - my guild has some of the most hardcore DPS-whores you can imagine - this is our Jin'rokh kill: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...d/?s=391&e=576 (fifth fastest kill worldwide so far according to WOL).
As you can see, I'm having no issues keeping up on singletarget. You can go through the logs, but disregard Tortos and Ji-kun as I was on bitch-duty there (punting turtles and flying loops). Did quite well on horridon too, but too much whoring is possible by staying on the boss instead of adds (hint - I don't whore). Magheara is protectors V2 ;_; - and again, I don't whore.

Realisticly, I think SV will do VERY well this tier, anyhow.

That has been my experience as well. However, I would consider Jin'rokh to be an outlier in terms of our overall effectiveness this tier especially considering how much of a joke it is on normal and the fact that it is the only patchwerk-esque boss this tier.

That has been my experience as well. However, I would consider Jin'rokh to be an outlier in terms of our overall effectiveness this tier especially considering how much of a joke it is on normal and the fact that it is the only patchwerk-esque boss this tier.

I don't see why it would be an outlier. Rather, this is the boss most closely resembling Simcraft (100% uptime, singletarget, no movement of concern, etc).
Meaning that if we want to compare our class to simcraft, this is the boss we look at - the rest of them are favoring classes that has stronger multidotting than us (locks, spriest, boomkins - horridon, Maghaera, Council - I wasn't in on this, but just assuming). Hunters are extremely good for Tortos (high movement, rich possibilities for rolling serpent sting through multishot on everything), and Ji-Kun (high movement especially during downdraft, great for eggs due to STRONG 5-target damage, I could pretty much solo nests). Will see after tonight how I feel about the rest, going in "blind" because we don't believe in PTR .

At the top of my post. And when we are discussing top players, movement really is not as big an issue as people like to think.

I didn't say our DPS is lower... And BM is still top in a vacuum. But almost every fight this tier has some kind of mechanic which is better handled by Survival.

Also, I am not basing my analysis on just Simcraft but my initial experiences as my guild has been clearing ToT.

Hmmm... don't see where you posted that lol.. but no worries.

And I should rephrase what I said. The DPS with all classes will vary depending on if the encounter has adds, how many adds, how long are these adds up, can you cleave these adds, how much movement is in the fight (Ji-Kun comes to mind, arcane will suffer here), are there damage modifiers and how do they work... etc.

my first impressions are optimistic, i did 2# on horridon with horrible use of cd's, 5# on CoE (next time i will serpent sting everything), and 1# on tortos by a 10k dps margin. No data from jin'rokh since i was on bench.

Yeah, I didn't do to bad either on the charts. Mind you my DPS was a little low on some fights due to raid leading and trying to figure out how to down the boss properly. I'm sure it will go up next time around.

tortos is the ultimate scumbag dps fight.. ignore mechanics.. tunnel the bats.. keep srs MoC rolling on boss.. switch to boss with debuff when bats are down.. ignore turtles.. but alas, not always possible.. I had to switch to the turtles.. But yea first boss should be a good fight to judge single target dmg on for atleast warlocks and hunters and melee.. still decent amount of movement to compare all the classes.

I don't see why it would be an outlier. Rather, this is the boss most closely resembling Simcraft (100% uptime, singletarget, no movement of concern, etc).
Meaning that if we want to compare our class to simcraft, this is the boss we look at - the rest of them are favoring classes that has stronger multidotting than us (locks, spriest, boomkins - horridon, Maghaera, Council - I wasn't in on this, but just assuming). Hunters are extremely good for Tortos (high movement, rich possibilities for rolling serpent sting through multishot on everything), and Ji-Kun (high movement especially during downdraft, great for eggs due to STRONG 5-target damage, I could pretty much solo nests). Will see after tonight how I feel about the rest, going in "blind" because we don't believe in PTR .

A mechanic which modifies the damage you do which goes up/down throughout the fight. This causes you to move your cooldown usage around. So yes, it is an outlier. It may be the "closest" mechanic wise to a patchwerk fight, but the damage buff throws it off for me.

Why aren't you looking at http://simulationcraft.org/520/Raid_T14H.html ?
The T14H profiles have been optimized much more, and are probably more balanced on the effort put into each of them as well. There's no legendary meta gem which Blizzard is fine-tuning every week, and you can much much better compare those numbers to actual WoL/recount numbers ( even though the usual restrictions apply ). I'm sure all those hardcore dps whores aren't raiding in full T15H equip yet.

A mechanic which modifies the damage you do which goes up/down throughout the fight. This causes you to move your cooldown usage around. So yes, it is an outlier. It may be the "closest" mechanic wise to a patchwerk fight, but the damage buff throws it off for me.

I would consider Durumu to be much better, or even Iron Qon.

I don't see why. Everyone gets the buff in the same amount (assuming we're talking about top end guilds), apart from having to run out with the debuff. Thus the buff is a non-factor.
As for timing your CD's, with a 3 minute fight there's no third rapid fire, and in order to get 3x AMOC off, you have to use it instantly on the pull. Not really alot to think about there, they're used on CD like always.
AS for Durumu, BM seems to be favored there over Surv (burst for adds+more damage going out in the eye sore phase if you're not fully comfortable "dancing" yet), but I did manage ~125k as surv. The only thing beating BM is rogues, Surv is "average" to "higher than average" than everyone else.

At the top of my post. And when we are discussing top players, movement really is not as big an issue as people like to think.

I didn't say our DPS is lower... And BM is still top in a vacuum. But almost every fight this tier has some kind of mechanic which is better handled by Survival.

Also, I am not basing my analysis on just Simcraft but my initial experiences as my guild has been clearing ToT.

BM is probably only good on a few fights like Jinrokh, Durumu and Iron Qon. Everything else has some sort of target swapping / movement that will make your pet lose dps. Not to mention that pets despawn randomly on Magaera which is really annoying.

BM is probably only good on a few fights like Jinrokh, Durumu and Iron Qon. Everything else has some sort of target swapping / movement that will make your pet lose dps. Not to mention that pets despawn randomly on Magaera which is really annoying.

I'm pretty sure the reason our pet despawn on Magaera is because of lynx rush. Once I switched to a murder of crows, my pet stopped despawning.

It's important to consider that SV scaling is pretty bad this tier. Since Durumu/Iron Qon/Magaera are mid-late tier bosses, and they are all single target, it's likely you will see BM and MM being played for these encounters (unsure on Ra-den?). Other than that it seems unlikely that you'd ever play anything but SV. With the real PPM mechanics and the bloodlust trinket I'm also unsure on whether BM or MM will be better, but I think this comparison is largely irrelevant since it will depend largely on whether or not you have a heroic weapon.

They really do need to nerf multidotting if they're going to have a tier where it is prominent on almost every fight though. It's a bit ridiculous when 80% of the tier is going to be dominated by multidotters, and most of the multidot classes also provide far more raid utility as well. At least hunters are good for odd jobs I guess (kicking turtles, orbs, clouds).

One reason for low numbers could be that your "BiS" gear is wrong. Theoretically the highest DPS pieces would be only using 1 piece tier. Which would be shoulders. Every other piece is better DPS than tier pieces.

---------- Post added 2013-03-08 at 09:51 PM ----------

Also, it seems that your survival parse is using Dire Beast instead of Fervor.

One reason for low numbers could be that your "BiS" gear is wrong. Theoretically the highest DPS pieces would be only using 1 piece tier. Which would be shoulders. Every other piece is better DPS than tier pieces.

---------- Post added 2013-03-08 at 09:51 PM ----------

Also, it seems that your survival parse is using Dire Beast instead of Fervor.

I somehow doubt that the tier bonus is worth less than the offpieces, even if you assume full thunderforged. Even if it does, Blizz will make sure that it becomes worth it, just like they did monks in T14.